Apparently the second book in the series features the big bad somehow managing to end the climactic battle by accidentally beheading himself. ("Now, the head lives for a few seconds after it's removed from the body. Can I call on my dark god?" "No!")
I thought he died because his magicka/soul didn't finish cooking because C-section babies aren't allowed. I mostly skimmed by that point. Also some of the pages weren't loading right for me lmfao. Kindle was trying to save me Edit: oops were you not referring to the fifth sorceress books XD
Hm. I may have been informed wrong by the commentators, but apparently that's a thing one of the villains does.
So, er, that's a thing, which sounds relevant to this thread. ETA: I tracked it down, and, well, wow.
Giggling at Fifth Sorceress again, in which the magical tome of prophecies appears to have over two thousand pages in only its first chapter. Wow.
Imagine how thick the darn thing has to be? Why could the ancients have made it a series of tomes instead of one?
Here is how a bad thriller describes a shot from what is supposed to be a perfectly ordinary sniper rifle:
If by 'bisected' you take the more modest case of 'penetrated'... well, it's absurdly unlikely, but not inconceivable. A .308 round might penetrate a cinderblock wall after already going through said terrorist with enough force to thoroughly break someone's windshield, but the cow is... a little far. (For starters, cows are big enough you need a decently precise hit to reliably kill one with that kind of caliber anyways). If by 'sniper rifle' we mean 'anti-material rifle'... well, there's still absurd luck involved.
With the "bisected" involved it has another layer of unlikelihood, and adding the computer it shattered in the middle there would probably slow it down a bit too.
Wait so if it demolished the windshield what did it ricochet off of? Did it bounce off the windshield but crack it in the process? This bullet has a mind of its own and it is DETERMINED to wreak as much havoc as possible
Maybe it went through the windshield at an angle or like... through both windshield and rear window, and then ricocheted off the pavement? But yeah. It's like it's an armor-piercing, cow-seeking munition. Though I am suddenly reminded of that one time a tank shot some guy's chicken coop during an Italian training exercise...
If an author wants to get across that one side of two feuding families is in the right, maybe don't have the grudge have been started by something that was completely normal and considered fair at the time it happened. I don't think anyone should be whipped, but centuries of grudges and murder over one party's ancestor having had the other party's ancestor whipped for a theft they know he did in fact commit during a time period when that was actually one of the more lenient punishments for theft basically comes off as still being mad centuries later that your ancestor didn't get special treatment for no reason.
… Hmm. What were the social stations of the people involved? Because if it was a noble ancestor, and the whipping was somehow public or humiliating in a way that brought shame on the family such that their standing is still affected generations down the line, I could maybe see that happening. Of course, in that case, the objection wouldn’t be to the whipping itself, but the humiliation of being treated like a common criminal- basically, yes, that they didn’t get the “special treatment” that they felt was owed to them as a matter of status. Not that their ancestor was brutalized, but that they were shamed, and that hit them in the family name/fortune. … Which doesn’t sound like it’s what’s going on here, given your impression that the author sounds like they’re just trying to load up the “This One’s Right” meter.
Nope, the person who was whipped was a servant of the other family and stole from them. I could imagine that generation wanting revenge because they were basically in a shitty Cinderella situation and stole food because they were starving, and revenge for them being put in the situation of needing to steal in the first place, but it was played off like the whipping itself was horribly unreasonable when it was the standard penalty and the guy who did the stealing would know that, and it was used to justify multiple murders over the next multiple centuries, which is a bit much.
Then again, this is the same book series in which our supposedly intelligent heroine was kidnapped more or less by "Hi, I'm an extremely threatening stranger, wouldn't you like to come with me?" to which she noticed all the red flags because it's in first person but went along with the creepy guy anyway. And the author can't decide if the feud started in the 1400s or 16oos and I have the horrible feeling she doesn't know they were different.
Thing from comments on a spork of "Growing Around", a book awful enough on its own merits, which I think is a suitable line to draw for the point at which a portrayal of something terrible becomes actively creepy:
